It was just after 3 a.m. and Jessica Cusumano was alone in her flat on the outskirts of Amsterdam, trembling with worry, when she heard someone at the door.
It had been hours since Cusumano had heard from Shimon Levita, her goateed drug-runner sweetheart, and what she'd heard did not sound good. Levita's voice had sounded strained as he spoke by phone from a tramway platform several miles away, where he was returning from a meeting with his boss and father-figure, a burly Israeli named Sean Erez.
"He was talking funny, like people were watching him,” Cusumano said.
A lieutenant in one of the largest ecstasy-smuggling rings prosecuted in the United States, Cusumano said "Shimmy” had been growing more nervous by the day.
Recently, the couriers he recruited from Hasidic Jewish enclaves in New York City to secret the popular drug into the United States from Amsterdam had been disappearing before they reached their destinations.
Among them were Eli Freedman and Mikhal Ruth Stern, a young Orthodox couple from Far Rockaway, arrested April 14, 1999, at France's Orly Airport carrying 80,000 ecstasy pills stamped with the shape of a Superman insignia.
Two days later, Fruma Goldman, of upstate Monsey, had been nabbed at Dorval airport in Montreal after stepping off a SwissAir flight from Brussels with 45,000 Superman pills tucked into her luggage.
Levita and his partners worried that the arrested couriers, more than a dozen in all, were aiding prosecutors and drug agents alarmed by a recent upsurge in ecstasy use by teenagers and young adults in the United States.
The drug operation allegedly run by Erez was unremarkable, except for the Hasidim. Where other ecstasy smugglers have used strippers, college students and musicians as "mules,” officials say it was Erez' idea to use naiveand some not-so-naiveteenagers from New York's Hasidic communities to move the party drug safely into the United States
Erez' main recruiter was Levita, the son of a prominent member of the Bobover Hasidic community who fell in with Erez while still living with his parents in their Boro Park home.
With the Hasidim's dark hats, side curls and 19th-Century garb, Erez and Levita believed that officials would never look at the cloistered youths as potential drug runners. For a while, they were right.
Through their use of young Hasidic and Orthodox Jews as couriers, prosecutors say, the Erez organization made a killing in a wide-open drug market where $10,000, a plane ticket and a conversation with a stranger can earn an enterprising twentysomething millions of dollars in the manufacture and wholesale of little colored pills.
"You can be an 18, 19, 20-year-old kid and go to Amsterdam, go into a coffee shop and, cash in hand, be making your own ecstasy,” one investigator said.
More than a year after the arrests began, Erez, the alleged head of the conspiracy, sits in an Amsterdam jail, where he and his girlfriend, Diana Reicherter, of Franklin Square, are fighting extradition to the United States. With the exception of Reicherter, Erez' former associates and couriers have all pleaded guilty.
According to prosecutors and defense attorneys, Jessica Cusumano was a naive bystander lounging in the middle of a criminal enterprise that produced and exported more than 800,000 ecstasy tablets into the United States, illegal drugs that powered all-night dance parties in New York City, Long Island and Miami at a street value exceeding $12 million.
Nationwide, ecstasy seizures by the U.S. Customs Service have soared from 350,000 tablets a year three years ago to 9.3 million pills a year.
It is this flood of contraband, Customs Commissioner Raymond Kelly says, that has pushed abuse of the drug, which has been used by college and high-school-age revelers since the mid-1980s, to new heights.
"In a strange kind of way, the supply, the fact that it is there, has increased demand and lowered the price,” Kelly said in an interview. "Pills were going for $40 in some places, and now they are going for $10.”
Mass marketing of MDMA, the chemical compound that was dubbed ecstasy by market-savvy dealers in the early 1980s, and counterfeit pills that contain far more dangerous compounds, has "resulted in mass use,” said Kelly, the former New York City police commissioner.
Authorities are left to contend with a significant drug boom that is common among middle-class youth, extolled in club and hip-hop music, but devoid of any established monopolies, organizations and kingpins for police to target.
As Kelly said recently, "There is no Mr. Big that we know of.”
While the profits are high, the risk of imprisonment for smugglers is great as well. Smugglers caught by the feds face decades in prison. Those prosecuted in state courts could go away for life under New York's tough drug laws.
By the summer of 1999, Shimon Levita could feel the law closing in.
According to prosecutors, the arrests of the couriers had soured the tempers of Erez and his band of smugglers. By that June, it seemed the Atlantic Ocean that had put so much distance between Levita and troubles back home had become little more than a shallow moat.
Levita had feared he was being watched by the police in New York and Miami, Cusumano said in an interview. What the pair did not know that summer night in 1999 was that a federal grand jury in Brooklyn had indicted Levita, Erez and several others on drug-conspiracy charges.
It had been an incredible year for Levita and his girlfriend, one that had taken the star-crossed teenage couple from working-class homes in Brooklyn and Staten Island to the plush party life on Miami's South Beach and then to Amsterdam's unflappable culture of legalized drugs, gambling and prostitution.
By 3 a.m. on June 21, 1999, Jessica Cusumano, an 18-year-old high school dropout, and Shimon Levita, her barely-18 Yeshiva-educated Romeo, were coming to the end of a memorable adventure.
"I will never forget it,” she said. "It is very hard to forget.”
During their months in Miami, they had stayed at fancy hotels like the Loewes and the Tiffany, Cusumano said. At night, Shimmy's friend Tiny, identified by authorities as drug dealer Richard Harris Berman, would escort them past the lines of revelers and into the hottest clubs in Miami Beach. They never paid a cover charge.
In April, 1999, prosecutors say, Levita stuffed a duffel bag with $100,000 cash and the couple moved to Amsterdam.
It was a whole new world.
"Amsterdam, everything's different,” Jessica said, the wonder of it all still in her voice. "Different language, different environment, weird people. Weird like they don't care, they don't give a crap. They have riots out there. Like, me and Shimmy walked past the police out there and they were smoking weed, 'cause it's legal out there.”
The couple lived a life of shopping, gambling and fancy dinners that most would envy.
The tough-talking Erez was their mentor. "He was like a Gambino,” Cusumano said. "He thought that he was a Donnie Brasco type, like a Mafia type, like that. He was nice, but he was sometimes mean.
"Sean was like Shimmy's father,” she said. "He looked out for Shimmy.” After all, she said, "We're both teenagers.”
With a knock at the door, it was over.
Jessica, a bloodshot bundle of hope and nerves, bounded past her pet chihuahua, Precious, to see if Shimmy was finally home.
She threw open the front door to find not her hazel-eyed boyfriend, but a gaggle of officials from the Dutch national police, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration and the U.S. Embassy.
The officials had grabbed and handcuffed Levita on the tram soon after he got off the cell phone with Jessica, she later learned. The Hasidic Jewish dropout who, according to Cusumano, regularly prayed mornings and evenings even as he exported drugs to the United States, was shipped to the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn to await trial.
The lawmen left Jessica alone.
Speaking at her home in Staten Island where she lives with her mother, Cusumano, now 19, said the officials did what they could for her. "They were very, very nice,” she said. "One of the guys even gave me money so I can, like, eat something.”
The event that led law enforcement to Cusumano and Levita was the arrest, on March 24, 1999, of one of Levita's couriers, Joel Gluck, 18, of Williamsburg. Gluck was stopped by U.S. Customs officers at Kennedy Airport with 30,000 ecstasy pills concealed in rolled-up socks in his suitcase.
This, Customs Commissioner Kelly said, was a surprise. "We'd seen them in the past be involved in diamond smuggling,” Kelly said of his agency's previous interactions with Orthodox Jewish suspects. "The fact that it was drugs was new.”
Gluck was humiliated over his arrest and frightened by the prospect of prison. Within a week, his lawyer later said, he began cooperating with prosecutors from the office of U.S. Attorney Loretta Lynch, setting the stage for Levita's flight a month later from Miami to Amsterdam to try to avoid prosecution.
On Nov. 5, 1999, Gluck was sentenced to 6 months of home detention. "I shamed my family and my community for what I did,” he told U.S. District Court Judge Edward R. Korman. "And the bad name will never be removed from that.” He did not return calls for comment.
Gluck's arrest was followed by those of a dozen other couriers, and, later, Shimmy and Jessica's friends from Miami and New York. There was Giacomo (Jimmy) Pampinella of Franklin Square, the conspiracy's Long Island connection. He was sentenced to 70 months in federal prison and 3 years' probation. "I thought that he was a really, really nice guy,” Jessica said of the drug dealer
Richard Harris Berman, the Miami drug dealer known as Tiny, pleaded guilty and awaits sentencing in a Brooklyn jail. Yves Cesar Vandenbranden II, a Jesuit-educated dealer known as "GQ,” is awaiting sentencing in Miami. Simcha Roth, an Orthodox youth who worked with Levita as a recruiter, pleaded guilty and is out on bail while awaiting sentencing.
But the alleged kingpin, Sean Erez, has not admitted guilt. Erez and his girlfriend, Dana Reicherter, stew in a Dutch jail, where the justice minister recently rejected their claims that psychiatric problems should prevent their extradition to the United States. Federal prosecutors expect to have Erez and Reicherter in custody early this year.
Shimon Levita no longer wears the garb of a Hasidic student. Nor is he seen in the slick clothes of a nascent nightlife prince. Levita is in a halfway house in Brooklyn after his release earlier this month from the federal Bureau of Prisons' Intensive Confinement Center in Lewisburg, Pa., a boot camp where he was sent after pleading guilty to federal drug conspiracy. He received a light sentence because he was a minor for most of the time he was involved. But Eli Freedman and Mikal Ruth Stern, the Far Rockaway couple recruited by Levita, were convicted in France of drug smuggling and sentenced to 3 years. Stern gave birth to a daughter in prison.
At Levita's March 28 sentencing, Judge I. Leo Glasser lambasted the Orthodox community for letting its children go so far astray. "They were traveling around Europe,” Glasser said. "They applied for passports. Where were the teachers? Who was keeping tabs on these boys who were bringing drugs back and taking money there?”
Levita blamed his sheltered background for his fall. "We didn't have no television and no radio,” he told the judge. "I didn't know what drugs were. But in nine months in jail, I learned what they can do.”
